Thucydides and Hobbes on Epidemics and Politics:

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes’s England was deeply troubled by the successive plague visitations‎ regularly occurring in the late 16th and 17th centuries. The catastrophic‎ outbreak in 1625 found Hobbes working on the first ever direct translation of‎ Thucydides’ History from Greek to English. This fact allows for the supposition ‎that Hobbes paid special attention to Thucydides’ masterful account of the plague at Athens and its social and political consequences. These circumstances‎ authorise the here proposed enquiry into the relation between Hobbes’s‎ understanding of the state of nature in Leviathan and the epidemics,‎ mediated by his experience of the plague and the translation of the plague narrative ‎in Thucydides’ History.‎